But alleged agents 'were not perfect'

 BY CAROL ROSENBERG

 Five Cuban agents systematically fed information on anti-Castro groups and military bases in South Florida to a tightly-controlled Havana-run intelligence system in a
 conspiracy to uncover American secrets, a prosecutor told jurors Tuesday in summing up the U.S. government's six-month spy trial.

 It is unimportant whether the Key West-to-Hollywood spy ring that was rounded up in September 1998 actually harmed national security, prosecutor Caroline Heck Miller said. Rather, it is enough that they conspired to pass along information -- using one member, René González, to infiltrate anti-Castro groups by posing as a sympathizer and another, Antonio Guerrero, to work as a janitor at a U.S. Navy base in Key West to snoop on air defenses and surveillance operations, Miller told jurors.

 "These spies were not perfect. But they were spies. They never did get anybody a job at Southcom,'' the Pentagon's headquarters for Latin American operations in Miami. "But that doesn't mean they didn't try. That doesn't mean that the conspiracy doesn't exist.''

 Miller will continue her arguments before U.S. District Judge Joan Lenard for about another hour today and then the defense attorneys will argue for acquittal. Jurors could begin deliberating Monday.

 Miller, meantime, has yet to focus on the most explosive part of the case -- that so-called ringleader Gerardo Hernández, who lived in Miami-Dade as the cartoonist
 Manuel Viramontes, conspired in the murders of four Brothers to the Rescue members whose Cessnas were rocketed by a Cuban MiG in 1996.

 FBI EVIDENCE

 Throughout her closing, Miller used an overhead projector and huge poster board enlargements of documents and intelligence intercepts to recap FBI evidence of Cuban spycraft. They included:

   A packet of death certificates of U.S. children of Hispanic background from which ring members culled their cover stories. "Ladies and gentlemen, I don't know if you saw that old movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers,'' she said. "But, that's what this is: New identities ready to be sown by the agents of the Cuban Intelligence Service.''

   Forms for amassing biographical data on U.S. military members, their families and civilian Pentagon employees in South Florida to help Havana controllers choose
 Americans who might be seduced into collaboration; the template included space for possible areas of exploitation -- sex, money and politics.

   Guidelines and running tips on what observations to report back to the Intelligence Directorate in Havana, and how quickly; Miller called the conspiracy "opportunistic,'' meaning members were assigned to "aggressively seek information . . . within the framework of the control of the Cuban Intelligence Service.''

   Wallet-size "cheat sheets,'' or business cards that contained personal details of the agents' bogus identities as well as intercepted diskettes and modem
 transmissions of data that showed their reporting.

   Secretly made FBI photographs of meetings between the accused and their alleged handlers, including one meeting in the men's room of a Wendy's restaurant in New York with a diplomat from the Cuban mission to the United Nations.

 The prosecutor also sought to stave off defense lawyers' efforts to marginalize their client's activities by casting the Cuban operatives as underpaid, overworked, not
 capable at their craft and easily detected by FBI agents who shadowed the ring for years.

 'GROUP OF BUMBLERS'

 "Maybe in retrospect, they looked like a group of bumblers with their identities laid bare to the world,'' she said. But with tinted contact lenses to change their eye colors and encrypted disks that at first appeared empty, "they were masters of numerous identities'' and "a formidable challenge to detection.''

 Guerrero's job as a janitor at the Key West base gave him access to areas that were off limits to the general public, such as the Bachelor Officers Quarters, a hotel,
 where he might have cozied up to pilots on training missions and befriended local civilians who cleaned their rooms.

 "Cleaning people are the very people who sometimes blend into the wallpaper and become invisible,'' Miller said, describing the work of the spy ring as seeking to uncover America's secrets, even when they were not labeled "top secret'' or "classified.''

 U.S. RESERVISTS

 For example, she said, by learning how U.S. air reservists train, Cuba would be able to learn how they would fight in time of conflict and "that is vital information to the experts of the Cuban Intelligence Service.''

 She also urged the jurors to set aside their personal politics when considering evidence that one spy sought to work on the campaign of Rep. Lincoln Díaz-Balart and another got Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen to write U.S. diplomats in Havana to help his wife immigrate here. Both are Republicans of Cuban American background.

 What is important, she said was a bid "to infiltrate and participate in U.S. political activity without notice of the U.S. Attorney General. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a crime.''

 Also accused with Hernández, González and Guerrero are Ramón Labañino and Fernando González, who is no relation to René González.

                                    © 2001